Sunday, May 21, 2017

Cold store

The Telegraph believes the BBC is about to close the digital doors of the BBC Store, wherein customers pay to downloard gems from an archive built with their licence fees. It's been running for around 18 months, but was years in gestation. Mark Thompson revealed the project, code-named Barcelona, in the same week he announced he would be leaving as DG, back in March 2012.

The problem is that there's more money to be made stitching the archive into packages to bulk out the streaming services of Netflix, Amazon and their competitors. The Telegraph says the Store "has failed to hit commercial targets". We may learn more from the annual report of BBC Worldwide - note 'may'.